writers in prison committee report - PEN Canada

NAWAL EL SAADAWI cairo

NAWAL EL SAADAWI cairo the tiny village of Kafr Tahla, just outside Cairo, is an unlikely birthplace for a courageous feminist crusader, but it was there that Nawal El Saadawi was born, in 1931. Her work changed the world for women in Egypt, but her battle was never easy. Unusually for women of her generation in Egypt, she studied medicine at the University of Cairo and graduated as a doctor in 1958. After 10 years of practice, she became Director General for Public Health Education in the Egyptian Ministry of Health, but before long, her increasing militancy began to annoy the authorities. In 1969 she published women and sex, in which she attacked the practice of female circumcision and argued a connection between female sexuality and political and economic oppression. She lost her job in 1972, and the next year, the magazine health, which she founded and edited, was shut down. Without a job, El Saadawi turned to writing, publishing the novel woman at point Zero in 1973 and its non-fiction counterpart, the hidden face of eve in 1977. An outspoken critic of the regime of Anwar Sadat, she was arrested and imprisoned in 1981 for “crimes against the state,” but prison did not stifle her determination: she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA) — the first legal, independent feminist organization in Egypt — and continued to write, at times scribbling her words on toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil. Once she was released, in 1983, those scraps of notes were transformed into memoirs from the women’s prison, in which she wrote, “Nothing is 1980s more perilous than truth in a world that lies … there is no power in the world that can strip my writings from me.” With her reputation as a human rights activist growing internationally, El Saadawi faced hostility at home. In 1993, fundamentalist threats against her life forced her into exile in the United States with her husband, the novelist Sherif Hetata, but they returned in 1996. Since then she has persisted in her writing and her activism, despite the regular banning of her books and continued harassment, some of it quite bizarre. In 2002 she was accused of apostasy by a fundamentalist lawyer who argued in court that she should be forcibly divorced from her husband. She won the case thanks in part to international pressure. In 2004, she announced her candidacy for the presidency, and a platform of human rights, democracy and freedom for women, but government persecution forced her to abandon her plans. In 2007, she was threatened with the loss of her Egyptian citizenship in a case brought against her by a fundamentalist lawyer, objecting to her play god resigns at the summit meeting. She also won that case, and continues to write, and to fight for women’s rights, with some hard-fought successes, including a new Child Law in Egypt in 2008, banning female genital mutilation, a cause she has been championing for 50 years so that other girls would not be subjected to the same mutilation she underwent as a child. El Saadawi has published more than 40 books, and, in her late 70s, is still going strong, with passion undiminished. PEN CANADA 27